Rachel Reeves and the hospitality jobs bloodbath

Labour’s policies have dealt a huge blow to an industry that was already struggling — now thousands are paying the price.

- By Jonathan Prynn

The raw numbers tell only part of the story — but they are worrying enough. What the statistics show is the struggling hospitality sector — one of London's biggest employers — shedding huge numbers of jobs. And the crisis is deepening

When the Office for National Statistics revealed this month that the national headline rate of unemployment is once again back at five per cent, a deeper dive into the data showed how restaurants, bars and hotels have borne the brunt.

By October the number of payrolled jobs in the sector was down 2.5 per cent in a year, having fallen for 19 consecutive months. Since the election in July last year, about 111,000 hospitality roles have gone - most paying relatively modest salaries. It is almost half the total of 247,000 jobs lost across the economy over the period.

By comparison, the health and social work sector has seen a 60,776 increase in payrolled jobs over the same period as the Government has poured money into modernising the NHS and reducing waiting lists. No official figures exist on how many of those lost hospitality jobs are in London. But it is fair to assume that perhaps a third have been shaken from the capital's going-out scene.

So much for the numbers. What about the human impact? According to Mark Lewis, chief executive of Hospitality Action, the main charity providing support for workers in the sector, it has been profound. The organisation says it has seen a 29 per cent increase in applications for grants from workers who have fallen on hard times this year alone, often through unemployment, and a 118 per cent rise since 2021.

“Generally we're a good bellwether for the industry,” says Lewis. “When it is struggling our phones ring more. And over the past five to six years we have regularly been seeing record months in terms of applications for support.